Re-view: Onnasch Collection, Hauser & Wirth - exhibition review

Hauser & Wirth devotes its three West End galleries to a selection from Reinhard Onnasch's holdings. He owned galleries in Berlin, Cologne and New York, and it’s an electrifying show, a guide to major players and movements in post-war art, particularly in America

4

Friday 20 September 2013 16:02 BST

Occasionally, art dealers tuck away the best works that cross their paths for themselves. Such is the case with Reinhard Onnasch, who owned galleries in Berlin, Cologne and New York. Hauser & Wirth devotes its three West End galleries to a selection from Onnasch's holdings, and it's an electrifying show, a guide to major players and movements in post-war art, particularly in America.

The quality of the collection shines through — much will draw envious gazes from the Tate. The downstairs room of the Piccadilly gallery is jaw-dropping, with early assemblages by the Los Angeles artist Ed Kienholz. Among them is The Future as an Afterthought (1962), a vision of the nuclear age, featuring a tall circular table topped with a cluster of dolls, one of whose heads sits on the base of the table.

As a silhouette, the sculpture reads as a mushroom cloud — it teems with anxiety, unsurprising in the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kienholz is a master of the creepy cluster of detritus, an heir of surrealism in his love of a jarring juxtaposition and an unsettling mood.

Robert Rauschenberg also used everyday stuff in his Combines — a chair, in Pilgrim (1960), exhibited here — but where Kienholz was grimy and suffocating, Rauschenberg is expansive, fluent and colourful. Pilgrim is a highlight of the first of the Savile Row galleries, dedicated initially to pop art, with a group of Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures, and then to minimalist and conceptualist art, including an imposing Richard Serra prop work and a shimmering Dan Flavin fluorescent light sculpture.

It also includes the show’s only duff moments — paintings by mavericks John Wesley and William Copley which prove that Onnasch’s eye occasionally falters.

But the sheer breadth of his taste is reflected in a gallery of American abstraction, including works by Frank Stella and Morris Louis. Two huge Clyfford Still paintings hang either side of a doorway, one dominated by a deep ultramarine blue, the other a warm white, both interrupted with vivid patches of colour and bare canvas. It’s a breathtaking moment in a first-class show.